Guided Navigation in Power BI
Dashboards that tell good stories are premium dashboards.
A body could for example create a 12 month cash flow forecast and call it a day’s work.
…….Or instead, one could tell the story intended to be told by the dashboard and have a dashboard that reveals the sequential milestones along the 12 month cash projection. The milestones expected to be the major contributors to the cash balance and their causes and effects on the business.
One of the challenges in getting this right is that even with the best told stories, it is possible to lose the story sequence or that the emphasis is placed in the wrong place and the story is not conveyed to the people who rely on the dashboard to make sound business decisions.
This is where Guided Navigation in Power BI offers a method for surfacing the stories that your dashboards are intended to tell.
The animation below demonstrates this method through telling the story of a 12 month Cash Flow Projection and the associated relationship between Cash and Debt.
This technique is simple in the technical aspect but combined with creativity it can be a powerful storytelling tool. From a technical POV, we’re using a combination of two concepts in Power BI: 1) Transparent Shapes AND 2) Bookmarks.
And we do it using these easy steps…..
Steps to Creating Guided Navigation in Power BI
1) Create 4 semi-transparent shapes to use as page blur.
2) Place them around the object you want to spotlight.
3) Set the layer order of the blur shapes above the visual to highlight.
4) Create a bookmark to save the highlighted layer order.
5) Create another bookmark with the blur shapes off.
6) Assign the bookmarks to a trigger element like a button.
Example: Here we wanted to create an interactive experience, letting the user access visual comments.We added buttons to navigate through different spotlights.
Guided Navigation Example
The Story: The Cash in Bank 12 months from now will be $2.5m. 48% of this cash was in the business to start, 30% of this cash was generated from operations and 22% is the net of Debt incurred and Assets acquired. In September we made the decision to incur debt and invest in new machinery for diversifying our product lines.
Our ‘Artificial Intelligence Cash Counsel’ suggests that our Cash to Debt Ratio is within acceptable bounds for the next 12 months and that our new product line will keep our Cash to Debt Ratio in the safe zone (above 1) beyond 12 months.
Conclusion
Since you began reading this blog until now, Story-Telling Dashboards are still premium Dashboards.
A Guided Navigation in Power BI is great for daily use but can apply equally as well to presentations, training and user manuals for your dashboards Go forth and enjoy the new Navigation power that you wield.